Mar 22, 2010

Poetophorus

Still catching up here at Vrzhu. Mr. Carmine Starnino has an interesting essay here. It remarkably even-handed, and has a Montaigne-like amble to it. Two statements bear on some of the Vrzhu Research Bureau's ongoing projects.

True enough, especially since the first echoes Ed Dorn's brilliant insight that poetry is an archaic technology, like gas lamps. Quaint, but not to be used in any practical sense.

And Americans enjoy appearing, above almost all else, practical.

HOWEVER, the limit of this is that the poet will write only for herself, or for others who are so like herself as to make the difference negligible (e.g., other poets). This is a problem that can be described as a feedback loop limited to only positive information. This tends to increase the entropy of the system (the sum of all poems set down) and eventually complete stasis--the heat death of a poetry system.

What's needed is what any healthy feedback loop has: negative feedback. NF helps maintain the stability of the poetry system, just a positive feedback give the system access to new point of equilibrium.

We here at the VRB have been working for many, many years on a way to augment any poetry system, either individual or collective, and enhance the poetic output, allowing for the autoexcitation that promotes poetogenesis (or poetopoesis), the development of books and poetic concentrations at various cultural nodes (the avant guardians, formalismatics, Fluff, etc.).

The foundational mechanism is to create a negatively charged surface for the poem to encounter, thus separating out the positive and negative fields in any poem. This allows the producer of the poem to distinguish those elements that can be canceled out, leaving a refined poetic residue that can be used to generate more poems.

Below are some of the earliests prototypes of the Poetophorus, as we call it. The second to the last illustration is a VRB specialist testing an actual poem for coherence. The most recent Beta model of the Poetophorus is at the bottom.